Back in 1974, a
Filipino producer named Jimmy L. Pascual ended his two year run of
Hong Kong-based kung fu productions and brought his film outfit to
the Philippines to make a film called Devil Woman. Essentially a chop
sockey cashing in on the kung fu craze like Pascual’s previous
films (The Bloody Fists [1972], The Awaken Punch [1973] amongst
others), Devil Woman is a rudimentary revenge saga with fantastic
elements and snake motif, a familiar ingredient in Asian horror.
Despite the regulation atrocious dubbing and wooden dialogue,
Rosemarie Gil is positively regal as the snake-haired queen seeking
revenge on the townsfolk for burning her parents alive, and the film
was a minor hit, even receiving a theatrical run in the US, and has
retained a small fanatical cult following thanks to Quentin
Tarantino’s regular screenings.

For years, fans of
Devil Woman saw posters for a film called Bruka Queen Of Evil
featuring Rosemarie Gil’s distinctive coiffure, and assumed it was
one of Devil Woman’s numerous export titles. When a trailer finally
appeared, the Devil Woman herself, Manda the Snakewoman, was indeed
in the film – but with entirely different footage of bats, walking
trees, and an army of little people. Was this the Filipino cut of
Devil Woman for the local market merely redubbed and resold, or an
entirely different film? Alas, no version of Bruka could be found,
even amongst the most intrepid of Asian collectors.

Imagine my surprise,
then, to discover a copy of Bruka Queen Of Evil last month [NOTE: this was written in May 2011] in my post
box. Ten minutes later, I can confirm Bruka is no Devil Woman.
Although made by the same production team and with many of the
original’s cast, its immediate sequel Bruka is an entirely
different creature. A quantum improvement on Devil Woman, the film
throws open Manda’s own personal narrative, giving her both a
legacy and a destiny, and adds a new protagonist’s magical quest
against a seemingly improbable array of oddities.

Bruka begins as
Devil Woman ends, with Manda engulfed in flames as she falls over a
cliff. Miraculously she survives, and wakes in a cave next to a
white-haired hag and a cadre of dwarves. “I’m your grandmother,”
the hag Bruka declares, and to prove the point, unfurls her
fifteen-foot snake body. She then shows Manda flashbacks to her birth
in a crystal ball, revealing Manda’s mother to have chosen a mortal
husband over her reptilian heritage. Manda’s so happy at the family
reunion, she literally dances for joy! Surrounding her is a brand new
arsenal for her protection: bats, rock creatures, tree-men, and
shape-shifting dwarves into snakes. Veteran contrabida Charlie Davao
is the test case, a poor villager who sees a figure under a sheet in
his yard. It turns out to be a wooden cross covered in reptiles who
almost drown him in venom. And with that, the Devil Woman sequel has
already shape-shifted itself to the next level of weirdness.

Grandma Bruka now
gives her granddaughter a special gift – a black stone which turns
her head full of angry snakes into human hair for as long as she
keeps the stone in her mouth. To test the theory, she goes for a
jungle stroll and kisses the first unfortunate hippie with a guitar
who stumbles upon her. Spitting out the stone, the snakes pounce.
Exssssscelent! In Bruka, Manda is no longed killing simply for
revenge, and is instead awakening her true inner evil, and exploiting
her outward normalcy to indulge her more primal, destructive
instincts.

In Bruka, Manda
faces a new antagonist in the shape of poor and angry Chinese Hong
Pin (Pascual’s kung fu kicking regular Alex Lung). He takes on the
job of finding rich Mr Tony’s daughter Louisa to buy food for his
ailing family. In an eerily effective sequence he walks into a
village obliterated by Manda’s snake scourge, bodies strewn
everywhere covered in flies and bite marks, and he helps bury the
bodies alongside a priest (Ramon D’Salva) and his hunchbacked
assistant. The forest is full of peril, warns the hunchback, and Hong
Pin must seek a hermit’s help. And as if on cue, Bruka’s dwarves
burst into the church, dissolve into snakes and cover the priest and
cripple. With the hermit’s rope-belt-turned-into-a-pole, Hong Pin
makes his way through hostile territory, through all manner of
creatures, to the cave containing Louisa and her virginal companions,
all ready to be sacrificed to the Snake Queens’ insidious blood
cult.

Pascual’s
Philippines output for his Emperor Films International included
another starring role for Lung, Dragons Never Die (1974), released in
the US on a double bill with Devil Woman, and three Tagalog horror
films released in 1975 alone for the local market (Isinumpa, Pagsapit
Ng Dilimand Pandemonium: Lupa, Langit At Impiyerno). But if there
was ever destined to be Filipino Lords Of The Rings with evil,
fondling, Riverdancing hobbits and bleeding trees, this is the one
film to rule them all. Those with a snake phobia, BEWARE; those with
eyebrows ready to be raised and a keenly-honed appreciation of the
absurd, enjoy, and I’ll see you at Ermita’s all-dwarf bar Hobbit
House for after-movie rum cocktails.

1 comment:

HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.